Databases

Vast collection of folktales, myths, legends, and texts pertaining to folklore, arranged by title and theme, with a focus on northern and western Europe.

The FRANTEXT database (formerly the Trésor de la langue française) consists more than 3500 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. Genres include novels, verse, theatre, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy.

A searchable database containing works by French women authors from the 16th to the 19th century. The Women Writers Project currently contains texts by 40 authors. There are 5.1 million words, 98,000 unique forms in 99 documents.

Search across Gale's primary source databases, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), with links to additional content from ProQuest's Early English Books (EEBO).  Individual databases can also be explored separately or in combination.

A database of almost 80 encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.

Globe on Screen 1&2, available from Drama Online, includes a selection of critically acclaimed performances at Shakespeare’s Globe, founded by the pioneering American actor and director Sam Wanamaker. Dedicated to the exploration of Shakespeare’s work and the theatre for which he wrote, Globe on Screen video collection contains 30 stunning stage productions representing over 75 hours of content. Recorded live on the Globe stage in high definition and surround sound, the videos feature performances from leading actors including Mark Rylance, Stephen Fry, and Roger Allam’s Olivier award-winning role as Falstaff in Henry IV.

Provides detailed indexing and abstracts for almost 700 periodicals covering the humanities (of which 470 are peer-reviewed), including feature articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, as well as reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more. Subject coverage includes archaeology, classical studies, art, performing arts, philosophy, history, music, linguistics, literature, and religion. 

This database covers Japanese literary works translated into other languages, mostly after World War II. Searches can be made either in Japanese character or Roman letters.

The Guide consists of 226 alphabetically arranged entries on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods. Each entry includes numerous cross-references, hyperlinks to related entries, and citations for further reading. This full-text guide can be searched by name, topic or keywords. The print work Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (MILLS Bookstacks PN 81. J554)  is related to this online guide

JSTOR provides access to a digital archive of journals in the areas of Arts, Business, Economics, and Sciences. JSTOR includes the entire runs of these journals, from the very first issue to the volumes published a few years ago. With a small number of exceptions - the "Current Scholarship" titles - JSTOR is a backfile collection and excludes the most recent issues (as part of the terms of the agreement with the journal publishers).

A database on Greco-Roman antiquity (second millennium B.C. to 800 A.D.) covering a wide spectrum of subjects - language and literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, law, science and technology. It indexes books, articles in journals, conference papers and dissertations in English, French, Spanish, and German languages; 1,500 periodicals are covered. A brief abstract accompanies each article entry.

Provides free, organized access to electronic resources in medieval studies through a World Wide Web server at Georgetown University. The Labyrinth's easy-to-use menus and links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images on other servers around the world.

Brings together more than 100,000 pages pages of poetry, fiction, and over 450 plays written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States. Among the gems of the collection are nearly 800 items (poems, novels, and plays) that have never been published before. Researchers will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays. It contains over 133,465 pages.

A full-featured scholarly resource for original research into the entire lexical content of Early Modern English. A historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods.

Collection includes works that have had a significant bearing on English and American traditions of theory and criticism, or which have influenced contemporary theoretical debate in the English-speaking world. All works in the database appear in English. The database includes formal treatises on criticism and aesthetics, discourse on the character or practice of specific genres, and a selection of literary biography, criticism, and history that illustrates important general arguments and precepts.

Provides the full text of more than 350,000 works of poetry, drama and prose from the eighth century to the present day.

Provides critical analyses, biographies, and bibliographies for authors from every age and literary discipline. The database covers more than 130,000 novelists, essayist, poets, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors.  Content is pulled from several well-known print reference series including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Contemporary Authors.

This primary sources database presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia; it also includes accounts of travel to and through the Holy Land.

Provides detailed information on over 6,000 journals and book series that cover literature, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, language, linguistics, pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and the history of printing and publishing. It serves as a resource for scholars seeking outlets to publish their work, providing information on topics covered, editorial policies, contact information, and submission guidelines.  Articles published in works listed in the directory are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Includes over 2 million citations covering literature, language, film, linguistics and folklore. Provides access to scholarly articles in over 4,400 journals; also covers relevant books, dissertations, working papers, proceedings and bibliographies. The database also has an identifiable subset of more than 77,000 records that constitute the JSTOR subfile. This consists of citation records for documents in JSTOR's Language and Literature Collection. The documents date back as far as 1881 and contain direct links to the full-text articles on the JSTOR website.

Online collection of recorded sound, including folk, popular, classical and world music, speeches, and oral histories, delivered via streaming audio.

Browse by musical instrument, geographic area, or topic, e.g. American folk traditions, blues, bluegrass and old-time country, American Indian traditions, world traditions (by continent), jazz, classical, spoken word, sound effects.

Historical content includes: ballads from the American Revolution, War of 1812, or the American Civil War; freedom and protest songs from the Civil Rights era; songs from the Slave Coast; Canada's history in song. Spoken word content includes: speeches, biography, memoir, drama (e.g. ancient Greek tragedies), poetry, language instruction.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online provides full-text, fully searchable content from a wide range of primary sources. Archives published in the program include works in Western as well as non-Western languages and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other venerable institutions from around the globe. McMaster currently has access to these collections: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection and Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture 

Contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives provide a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, and in selected cases, the actual audio voices of the immigrants.

Contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure.

Covers many aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. Its goal is to provide detailed reference information for every theatrical figure, every play, every theatre, every major production, and every production company, from Colonial times to the present, in both Canada and the United States. To date it includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to approximately 30,000 plays, over 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, nearly 22,000 productions and 2,500 production companies. The collection also includes approximately 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.

OpenBook Publishers is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. Monographs and textbooks in all subject areas are published and all books are available to read free online.

Oral History Online is a landmark database of English language oral histories. It contains at present more than 30,000 pages of full-text content that is available nowhere else in electronic format, much of which is available nowhere else in any format. This full-text material includes Ellis Island oral history narratives, exclusive Black Panther Party interviews, and other oral histories. With each quarterly update of Oral History Online, the publisher will add more of such proprietary (in-copyright) full-text interviews.

Orlando documents the part women have played in the development of literature and includes biographical and writing career entries on over 1,200 writers, more than eight hundred and fifty of them British women. It also includes selected non-British or international women writers, and British and international men, whose writing was an important, sometimes a shaping, element in a particular writing climate. Entries are contextualized with thirty thousand dated items representing events and processes (in the accounts of these writers, but also in the areas of history, science, medicine, economics, the law, and other contexts).

Provides scholarly review articles summarizing current thinking and research in a range of subjects across the humanaities, social sciences, and sciences.  Each handbook offers in-depth introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship.  McMaster's access has expanded to include all 1200 Handbooks.

Provides full-text scholarly editions of selected philosophers and English literary writers. Works include published and unpublished texts, articles, essays, and correspondence, in both the original language, and, where required, in English translation. Contents include classical works in philosophy, history of political thought and theory, education, religious studies, economics, classics, history, and German studies.